Dance

Illustration by Justin Gabbard

THE SOULS OF THEIR FEET

The death of Jimmy Slyde, in 2008, was a major loss to tap-dance aficionados. At Symphony Space (April 16-17), Roxane Butterfly gathers fellow-acolytes, such as Tamango, for a tribute to Slyde that includes rare footage of the Master. ♦ As part of the “Falla and Flamenco” program at BAM (April 17), the Barcelona-based choreographer Ramón Oller interprets Manuel de Falla’s “El Corregidor y la Molinera,” an early version of the more famous piece “The Three-Cornered Hat,” in a modern-meets-flamenco mode. ♦ Compared to the computer imagery used by today’s dance companies, the decades-old illusions of Alwin Nikolais, with their elastic fabric and black lights and mirrors, can seem quaint. But they still deliver magic, as Utah’s Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company demonstrates in a retrospective on the centennial of Nikolais’s birth, first at Abrons Arts Center (May 1-2), then at the Joyce (May 4-9). ♦ Much of the interest in “DanceAfrica,” at BAM, comes in the compare-and-contrast between American groups and those directly from the mother continent. None of last year’s participants had to cross an ocean, but this year (May 28-31), the festival returns to form, featuring an uncommon visit from a Zambian company, the Pamodzi Dance Troupe.

O PIONEERS!

The postmodernist icon Trisha Brown, who began her career in dance by rejecting music, the proscenium stage, and at times gravity itself, celebrates her company’s fortieth season, at Baryshnikov Arts Center (April 7-11). Brown will revive her 1980 piece “Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503,” a luminous quartet performed within an ever-shifting landscape of mist, as well as a 1994 solo, “If You Couldn’t See Me,” set to an electronic soundscape by Robert Rauschenberg. ♦ As part of a season devoted to Martha Graham’s politically minded works from the thirties, the Martha Graham Dance Company has taken on an intriguing challenge: her “American Document,” from 1938, reënvisioned for a new age, in collaboration with the theatre director Anne Bogart, at the Joyce (June 8-13).

BIT MAP

Though the spell of Donna Uchizono’s elegant dances normally works through an accumulation of small, subtle effects, “Longing Two” has a large interruption at its core. The work begins at Baryshnikov Arts Center, then a bus provides transport twenty blocks south, to the Kitchen, for the second half of the show (June 1-5).

ARABESQUES

American Ballet Theatre will celebrate its seventieth anniversary with an eight-week season at the Metropolitan Opera (May 17-July 10). On offer will be the company première of John Neumeier’s evening-length ballet “Lady of the Camellias” and, from last year, Alexei Ratmansky’s one-act Prokofiev piece “On the Dnieper.” An evening of Frederick Ashton ballets includes the mischievous masterpiece “The Dream.” ♦ Across the plaza at the David H. Koch Theatre, New York City Ballet will unveil no fewer than seven new productions, as part of its season-long “Architecture of Dance” festival (April 29-June 27). There will be new ballets by Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Mauro Bigonzetti, and the young Briton Wayne McGregor, his first for an American company. Several works will have sets by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who’s making his first foray into stage design.